Stash Envy by Lisa Boyer

Author:Lisa Boyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Good Books
Published: 2016-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

The Making of a Quilt Rebel

When I was first married, my mother-in-law gave me a very large and detailed book on etiquette. I politely thanked her and tucked the book away unopened, thinking that it might come in handy some day. After all, I would look pretty silly if the Queen of England happened over for tea and caught my shrimp forks out of place. So I put the book on my bookshelf and waited for the foreign ambassadors to call, or at least the White House.

After a few years, I came to the conclusion that the First Lady must be avoiding me. I believe that the CIA must have tipped her off about my cooking, which I think is very unfair. Taste, texture, and palatability are highly overrated when evaluating food quality. Why is there no appreciation for mystery? I make the most mystifying food around. It can look like chicken and taste like tofu. I am a magician when it comes to flavor. Poof. It’s gone!

So since I wouldn’t be hosting any state dinners, I decided that I would finally toss the etiquette book into the garage-sale pile. But before I tossed it, morbid curiosity made me want to open it to see what minor infractions I may have been committing all these years. What met my eyes was a shock. There were hundreds and hundreds of rules in there. They covered everything from birth to death with lots of napkin-folding in between. I was completely flabbergasted. How could someone write a book telling other people how they were supposed to do every little thing? Oh sure, I can understand rules like, “Don’t chew with your mouth open,” but “Never leave your cutlery on your plate in a crossed position”?

Opening this book finally put me over the edge. It reminded me of why I disliked rules in the first place. Anyone can write a rule. How can I be sure that the person making up the rule is any better than I am? I had never met the author of this etiquette book. What were her qualifications? Even worse, what if no one liked her? What if she never got invited anywhere because people were too nervous about inadvertently intersecting their spoons with their forks?

I gave the etiquette book away at my garage sale to an unsuspecting woman buyer. She tried to give me a quarter for it, but I wouldn’t take it. Instead, I tried to remember her face permanently, as I planned to run the other way if she ever invited me to a party. Her expectations of me were probably already too high; she likely thought I had actually read that book!

Shortly after I jettisoned the etiquette book, I took my first quilting class. It is truly unfortunate for the quilting world that these two events coincided so closely in my life. Like an errant fork foolishly crossing a dessert spoon, my disdain for rules of convention crossed into my quilting life. Emily Post made me into a rebel; now the quilting world was going to have to deal with me.

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